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Paula Simons: PC Party civil war descends to new depths of incivility

Author of the article:

Paula Simons • Edmonton Journal

Publishing date:

January 19, 2017 • 4 minute read

PC party president Katherine O'Neill and interim party leader Ric McIver have very different versions of the vote that suspended Jason Kenney operative Alan Hallman this past Saturday.Photo by Ian Kucerak/ Postmedia

Last Saturday, the board of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta voted, unanimously, to censure Calgary political operative Alan Hallman and suspend his party membership for a year.

Hallman is a longtime Tory backroom boy and strategist, known for his aggressive, elbows-up approach to politics. He’s been intimately involved in Jason Kenney’s leadership campaign.

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After the gong show at the Tory convention in Red Deer, the PC party board made all four leadership team agree that their campaigns and campaign staff would play nice — on pain of party discipline.

A few weeks later, Hallman got into a series of spats with people on Twitter, in which he used a couple of mildly naughty insults. In truth, the things Hallman tweeted were pretty mild by Twitter standards. Nonetheless, the PC board was concerned enough by the tweets, and by Hallman’s past shenanigans at the disputed Edmonton-Ellerslie delegate vote, that they brought the matter up for discussion at their meeting.

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Kim Krushell, a board member and former Edmonton city councillor, proposed Hallman’s membership be suspended for six months. Others at the meeting, says Krushell, were concerned that a six-month suspension was illogical because memberships last a year. So, says Krushell, she accepted a friendly amendment to make it a year-long time-out.

“I like Alan Hallman,” says Krushell. “I worked with Alan on Jim Dinning’s leadership campaign. I didn’t want to put the motion to the floor. But I had to do it. When people break the rules, there have to be consequences.”

The motion passed, according to the public minutes, unanimously.

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There were 38 people voting in the room, and another four on the phone.

Both Krushell, and PC party president Katherine O’Neill, agree they saw Ric McIver, the interim leader of the PC party, vote in favour of the motion.

“He raised his hand. I witnessed him raise his hand,” says O’Neill. “He did. I don’t know why he’s going back on this.”

They say the suspension was also supported by Sonia Kont, the president of the PC youth organization. (Kont said she abstained from voting.)

O’Neill says she then asked people to confirm that the vote was indeed unanimous.

“This was a big deal. A suspension is something that we take seriously. It was unanimous. No one objected or abstained.”

The vote was duly recorded, and, says O’Neill, email notices were sent to all four of the leadership campaigns. It wasn’t long before the news of Hallman’s suspension hit social media as a weekend wonder.

By the next day, McIver was posting pictures of himself to Twitter, buddy-buddy with Hallman.

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The Progressive Conservative Youth of Alberta put out a statement announcing — apparently without the full support of their board — that Hallman had been named their honorary chair.

By mid-week, both Krushell and O’Neill were dealing with a vicious, misogynist blow-back, the virulence of which has left both women, who are no strangers to the rough-and-tumble of politics in Alberta, shaken.

Hallman, meantime, is publicly calling for O’Neill’s resignation, accusing her of bias against him, and publicly mulling legal action. The “unite-the-right” lobby group, Alberta Can’t Wait, has also begun a write-in campaign, accusing the board of bias against Kenney’s campaign.

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Why on earth would McIver vote for Hallman to be suspended, only to turn around a few days later to attack his own board for doing so?

McIver now insists he never raised his hand, although he admits he didn’t vote against the suspension, either. The PC interim leader says he was trying to figure out how his caucus-mates, Calgary MLAs Dave Rodney and Richard Gottfried, wanted to vote.

“I was fooling around on my phone and the vote went by,” McIver says.

But, he acknowledges, he never asked for a re-vote, never indicated that he was abstaining.

McIver says he was promised the suspension would be kept confidential, to protect Hallman’s reputation. He spoke out, he says, only when that promise was violated. But O’Neill says there was never any such deal because the vote was public, recorded in the party minutes.

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Hallman and his Calgary cronies ran Alberta politics behind the scenes, provincially and federally, for years. When Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau won, Calgary power brokers lost their power. Kenney is their ticket back to the big time. For them, this isn’t just about the future of the Tory party. It’s about their own status as movers and shakers who matter. So is this just a case of the Calgary old boys trying to bully a new generation of female leaders from Edmonton who’ve displaced them?

It’s not quite that simple, since this is also fight for the soul and the future of the battered Tory brand.

Are they going to be progressive Progressive Conservatives? Or will they fold the party and unite with a Wildrose Party that may not be so keen on a shotgun marriage? Right now, though, with its interim leader and its president offering up radically different versions of reality, the PC party seems less interested in unity of any kind and more interested in tearing itself apart.